Blog Profile / Writerly Life
| URL : | http://www.writerlylife.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Arts / Writing | |
| Posts on Regator: | 700 | |
| Posts / Week: | 2.6 | |
| Archived Since: | April 2, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Tuesday Tip: Cut the Mixed Metaphors
Tuesday Tips is a new category of posts here at Writerly Life that will be appearing every Tuesday. It’s a series of concrete tips for improving or kickstarting your writing. The tips that fall into this category are the sorts that you can do today or even right now, and they’re chosen to immediately re-vitalize [...]
The Great Gear Change
Only one class remains to be graded in my very busy semester, and the classes have stopped meeting. At long last, I’ve stretched my muscles, stepped away from my chair, and taken a look out the window. For the first time in months, I have time to think about my writing again, and to think [...]
Guest Post: Books to Get the Words Flowing
This week’s guest post is from writer Cara Aley. She has recommendations for books to read that should prove inspiring. Top 5 Prompt Books to Get the Words Flowing Even the best of writers feel bereft of ideas at times, and we all know how frustrating that can be. A dry spell, writer’s block—whatever you [...]
Grading and Writing and Vacationing — Soon
I’m in the final throes of the semester this week, grading a stack of final papers and starting to return to thoughts of creative writing. I’ll be very excited to get to that time just a handful of days from now when all that is left is the quest to polish my novel (and possibly [...]
Guest Post: What it Takes to Be a Writer
This week’s guest post is from blogger and freelance writer Allison. She’s continuing our discussion of personal publishing stories by adding her testimonial today. What it Takes to be a Writer You know, when I got the idea that I wanted to be a writer as a profession I did not really understand what that [...]
Guest Post: 5 Things to Do to Get Your Book Published
This week’s guest post is from web writer Nick Anderson. He writes about The 5 Steps You Need to Take in Order to Get Your Book Published. Getting a book published is not simply a matter of having an idea. If you are an aspiring writer, or even an experienced one, and want to get [...]
Tuesday Tip: Type Up What You’ve Got
Tuesday tips is a category of posts here at Writerly Life that promises to offer concrete tips for improving or kickstarting your writing. The tips that fall into this category are the sorts that you can do today or even right now. This week’s tip: Type Up What You’ve Got John Steinbeck wrote all of [...]
(Monday) Review: Middlemarch
George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans). Image from Wikipedia. Now at last we can return to the pleasurable life of books; and I can tell you about my latest addition to my exclusive five star list, George Eliot’s sweeping, realistic, biting, subtle Middlemarch. I don’t normally get excited about Victorian novels. I’m using that term loosely [...]
A Week in Boston
It’s been radio silence here at Writerly Life this week largely because of the chaotic and awful events that have seized my hometown. The world has seen the footage of the bombings at the Boston Marathon, and I’m sure you all know the feverish flood of details and images that followed; I won’t try to [...]
Links to Make You Think
We’re all busy these days, and hopefully busy with writing, but here is a roundup of some interesting stories, links, and articles that I’m thinking about this week. Literary consolation prizes. Gotta love ‘em. A little old now, but a fascinating interview with Nobel Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Find out why he recommends we [...]
Should I Read Contemporary or Classic?
THERE’S NEVER ENOUGH TIME TO READ ALL THAT MUST BE READ. We could spend our whole lives reading, Carl Sagan taught me in one episode of his show Cosmos, and still barely scratch the surface of a few shelves of the New York Public Library. So we struggle to read smart; we try to pick [...]
When Is My Story Ready for Publication?
As a creative writing teacher, I usually focus on the craft and art of writing. We talk in class about sentence structure, story, pacing, character development; we discuss word choice and mood. But students are always hungry for something else, too; they want to know, of course, about getting published. They want to know about [...]
Guest Post: Tightening Your Sentences
This week’s guest post is from online writer Reena Cruz. She writes about improving your writing on the sentence level, which I’ve often said is crucial for making your language fresh, varied, and interesting. 4 Handy Tips To Keep Your Sentences Interesting When you’re strung out for new ideas—or worse yet, suffering from writer’s block, [...]
Tuesday Tip: Try a New Form
Things at Writerly Life have been hectic in recent weeks as I work on my novel and work on grading papers for five different classes, but I’m eager to keep the narrative thread going. In what ways are you keeping the narrative thread of your writing life going? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts [...]
Thinking Spring in Your Writing
This evening, I finally had time to spend an Easter dinner with family, and to feel the prospect of spring coming. It’s still chilly here in New England, but the air has lost a particular bite of winter, and I can start to feel hope that spring is upon us. That means that I usually [...]
Tuesday Tip: Shorten Your Sentences
Tuesday tips is a category of posts here at Writerly Life that promises to offer concrete tips for improving or kickstarting your writing. The tips that fall into this category are the sorts that you can do today or even right now. This week’s tip: Shorten Your Sentences When my writing is at its sloppiest, [...]
What Makes Your Character Tick?
We often discuss how important characterization is in your story, but I think a lot of the character development we think about is wrong-headed. We’re told to know our characters inside out, so we make lists or questionnaires. We figure out our character’s shoe size and political party, his favorite foods and her favorite colors, [...]
Tuesday Tip: Follow Through
Tuesday tips is a category of posts here at Writerly Life that promises to offer concrete tips for improving or kickstarting your writing. The tips that fall into this category are the sorts that you can do today or even right now. This week’s tip: Follow Through In workshops, my stories would be praised sometimes [...]
AWP!
It’s been a hectic week, readers; I went to my first ever AWP, otherwise known as the yearly conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. This year it was in Boston, so I could hardly miss this massive convocation of literary magazines, small presses, panel discussions, and readings by distinguished authors. Two arena-sized [...]
Guest Post: Surviving as an Academic Writer
This week’s guest post is from writer Steve Aedy. A lot of us have to do other forms of writing for our day jobs, so Steve has some tips for writing discipline and craft that can apply to a wide variety of writing types. You’ll Never Survive as an Academic Writer If… As you embark [...]